Change Unlikely From Angolan Election, but Discontent Simmers

Angolans waited their turn to vote at a polling station in Luanda on Friday.Credit
Associated Press

LUANDA, Angola — From his doorstep, Paulo Silva can see emblems of his country’s transformation from war-addled basket case to petroleum powerhouse. A flock of cranes hovers over a skyline dotted with climbing skyscrapers, and dead center is a symbol of the country’s multiparty democracy: the half-built dome of the new home of Angola’s Parliament.

But as Angolans go to the polls on Friday for the third time in the country’s troubled history, Mr. Silva, for one, does not plan to vote for the party that built this city of plenty. From the slum where he spends his days, evidence of the nation’s wealth looms before his eyes, just out of reach.

“Angola is a rich country, but we don’t get any of it,” said Mr. Silva, who plans to vote for an opposition party. “The people in power are eating all the money.”

The governing Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, which has been in power for more than three decades, is expected to win the vote handily. Its leader, President José Eduardo dos Santos, has been in office longer than almost any other African head of state, and with complete control over the state media and vast campaign funds at his disposal, his victory is all but assured.

With the help of huge offshore deposits of oil that have made Angola Africa’s second-biggest producer of crude, Mr. dos Santos has built a nation where Porsches and Lamborghinis ply the city streets and luxury apartments loom over the skyline, and where the well-heeled dance at nightclubs with a $100 cover charge.

But millions of Angolans have been left behind. A vast gap yawns between the well-connected, penthouse-owning rich and the slum-dwelling, unemployed poor like Mr. Silva.

“We need a change in this country,” Mr. Silva said.

In a tacit acknowledgment of its failure to share the fruits of growth equally, the governing party unveiled a new slogan for this campaign: “More Growth, Better Distribution.”

Angola is one of several African countries that have molded their governments, in an unspoken fashion, on what is widely known as the Chinese model. Leaders who have been in power for decades in countries like Angola, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Uganda have delivered considerable economic growth and, by some measures, improvements in health, education and development.

Leaders of these nations, all of them scarred by internal conflict, have offered their citizens an implicit bargain of development and stability in exchange for robust democracy.

But the limits of this model are becoming apparent. Protest movements — often led not by the poor, who are usually shut out of the benefits of rapid growth, but by a frustrated, hemmed-in middle class — have chipped away at support for longstanding presidents like Mr. dos Santos, Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, who died on Aug. 20.

In Angola, a wave of protests beginning last year and inspired by the Arab Spring has shaken confidence in that formula. First young people and then military veterans took to the streets, prompting harsh police crackdowns.

“They try to follow the Chinese model, but they don’t even give bread in exchange for freedom,” said Rafael Marques de Morais, an anticorruption activist and journalist.

Angola’s brutal history long taught its people to value peace above all else. The Portuguese colonists fled the country in 1975, after withering battles with three guerrilla armies and a coup d’état back home that brought a leftist government to power.

The victorious Angolan rebels soon turned on one another, and a sprawling conflict, stoked by cold war rivalries and Angola’s rich diamond deposits, flattened the country. It did not fully end until 2002, when Jonas Savimbi, the charismatic but brutal leader of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, or Unita, was killed in a skirmish.

Even before the end of the war, the country’s economy had begun to grow rapidly because of the oil deposits. Close ties with China have produced an infrastructure boom, fueled by cheap, oil-backed loans.

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But accusations of corruption gnaw at the governing party, and it has clamped down hard in response to the wave of protest, arresting organizers and roughing up participants. Mr. dos Santos’s popularity has also waned, many analysts say. At an election rally held outside a huge stadium on the edge of the capital, Luanda, on Wednesday, loudspeakers carried the sound of recorded applause, apparently to spare him the embarrassment of a muted response to his speech.

The youth protest movement, fueled by popular rap stars who rhyme about corruption and poverty amid plenty, is using social media and text messaging to collect reports of election irregularities, said Luaty Beirao, a rapper who goes by the name Ikonaklasta.

“We have no access to public media, so we have to use the Web or any means we can to get the word out,” Mr. Beirao said.

Photo

A woman looked for her name at a polling station on the outskirts of Luanda on Friday.Credit
Stephane De Sakutin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Mihaela Neto Webba, a parliamentary candidate for Unita in Luanda, said she had no illusions about the party’s hopes for victory.

“All Angolans know that we have a compromised democracy,” she said.

“To have a credible, competitive and democratic process, everyone must abide by laws. But that doesn’t happen.”

State television gives most of the coverage to Mr. dos Santos, showing what amounts to campaign commercials for hours every day.

In the last election, in 2008, the governing party won more than 80 percent of the vote, and its portion this time is expected to remain substantial. Despite a high-tech, tablet-based voter registration system, early reports from poll monitors warned of long waits and erroneous registration data that told voters that their polling stations were hundreds of miles away. Results are not expected until Saturday.

A visit to the suburb of Kilamba, a brand-new city built with Chinese help, demonstrates why the president and his party remain popular. Wide boulevards lined with block upon block of tidy flats painted lavender, mint and butterscotch await aspiring middle-class families.

On Friday, Noe Joaquin Manuel, a 43-year-old functionary who works for the Defense Ministry, cracked open beers with friends on the balcony of his spotless new apartment.

“The government deserves to stay,” he said after conducting a tour of his three-bedroom home. “They ended the war. They have built bridges and roads and places like this.”

Besides, he added, voting a new party into power would simply mean allowing a whole new cast of characters to get rich off the government treasury.

“If we change, the new guys will have to steal first,” he said.

But protests by young people with no memory of the civil war and veterans owed years of back pay have raised hopes that change is on the horizon, even if the governing party wins on Friday.

“The hope for Angola is a new generation that is rising up,” Mr. de Morais said. “They are not afraid to cross political boundaries.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 1, 2012, on Page A11 of the New York edition with the headline: Discontent Simmers as Angolans Go to the Polls, but Change Is Unlikely. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe